Awareness of cracking is high, but if you own a PC that can play these games you can afford 60$ to pay for the game. Or you can just wait a little and get one of the millions of games on Steam for approximately no money.

You can put together a competent gaming PC for about $400 these days. Buy a refurb business desktop with a fourth-gen i5, add a GTX 1650 and you can run pretty much any game at 1080p on medium settings.

A lot of young people (or people in middle-income countries) can scrape together a few hundred bucks for an entry-level gaming PC, but would find a $60 game to be prohibitively expensive. IMO the move away from demo versions and physical media has substantially incentivised piracy - if you can't try before you buy and can't resell your game, you're less inclined to hand over your hard-earned cash for a game that you might hate.

I paid less than 20x that for the PC I run, that I bought 8 years ago. One single $60 title per year would add 1/3 to the total cost.

People can easily spend their entire money on a new PC and then not have the money to buy games.

You'd be surprised how many people with iPhones shoplift clothes worth much less than $60

Dude you obviously did not grow up on computer games, because if you did you may have saved up for that $500-$1000 gaming PC over a period of months (or years) and then had very little money left over or per month for games.

When I was younger I could barely afford a gaming PC and certainly didn't have very much money for games, and I knew a lot of other people in my boat. I lived for the bargain bin (and later, Steam Sales) and it was still not enough

Well, he did say "PC game buyers" :)